Preface

Welcome to Learning Material Design, a comprehensive guide to the latest and hottest design philosophy for mobile and web applications. More than just a design language, Material Design represents a powerful shift in how modern digital interfaces look and behave. Based largely on traditional design principles, Material Design brings a tactile look and feel to apps and pages, giving screen elements physical properties such as fluid, realistic motion and the ability to depict a third dimension using shadows.

Covering all major design principles and guidelines and including enough of the technologies and code required to implement them, the book is designed so that you can get started with building your own material interfaces from the very beginning.

All the commonly used material components, such as cards and sliding drawers, are covered in terms of both design guidelines and code structures. This element-specific approach is coupled with details on how Material Design can be applied to interfaces in general, and how to use these guidelines to create material transitions and navigation processes.

Although concentrating largely on mobile interface design and using the powerful Android Studio development environment, the latter part of the book focuses on how the principles learned earlier can be just as easily applied to designs of web and desktop interfaces with a number of helpful and simple-to-use CSS frameworks, particularly Materialize and Material Design Lite.

This book is only the beginning of a journey into what may well become one of the most persistent digital design paradigms we have yet seen. But by the end, you will have learned not only the design theory behind materials, but also enough of technical know-how to put what you have learned into practice and be in a position to create or convert Material Design applications on your own.